There are a lot of factors to consider when you’re trying to build a personal brand.
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
How will you market your brand and engage with your potential audience or customers?
How can you best position yourself for success?
For students who are just starting out on their entrepreneurial journey, connecting with mentors who have built their own personal brands – experiencing the ups and downs, the highs and lows – and who are excited to share what they’ve learned along the way can make all the difference.
But finding the right mentor isn’t always easy, and students often don’t quite know how to get started.
How do you initiate these kinds of conversations?
And what are the questions that you should ask?
‘Students Are Trying to Imagine Themselves After They Graduate’
Learning how to network is a skill, according to Julie Gehring, director of mentorship and student development at UConn’s Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and that skill is part of what she teaches students who sign up for NetWerx – a signature program at the Werth Institute that pairs students with alumni mentors to help cultivate those essential networking and entrepreneurial skills.
“If you learn how to network first, then you can learn how to build a relationship with somebody that leads to mentorship,” says Gehring.
Since its inception more than five years ago, NetWerx has operated with the goal of helping interested students build an entrepreneurial mindset through skills like communication, self-reliance, and adaptability. The program has worked by recruiting both current undergraduate students – typically those in their first and second years – who apply to take part and then matching them with alumni volunteers who are less than 15 years out from their own time at UConn.
For the students who are motivated, they can really get a tremendous amount out of this, because when you get out in the work world, and you’re sending your resume out into the universe without having any connection with anybody, it’s really, really hard — Heidi Bailey
“NetWerx welcomes any student interested in expanding their network and exploring ideas, even if they aren’t directly focused on starting a business,” Gehring explains. “We help students develop valuable entrepreneurial skills—like problem-solving, collaboration, and communication—that are essential for success in any field. Many of our alumni mentors, in fact, apply these skills within their organizations as ‘intrapreneurs.’”
“Students are trying to imagine themselves after they graduate,” says Heidi Bailey, an instructor-in-residence with the UConn School of Business who teaches courses on marketing and personal brand management. “NetWerx provides students with an incredible opportunity to build a relationship with a UConn alumnus who can share career tips, such as how they got started in their career, what success looks like in their field of interest, and who else they can work with in their industry.”
A Strategic Plan for Making an Impact
Alumni mentors come from a variety of backgrounds – everything from fintech to fashion, project management to health care, marketing to engineering – and commit to meet virtually with their mentees a least two to three times. They’re given orientation and training on how to be effective mentors before they’re paired with students an matching process that’s now bolstered by the use of PeopleGrove, a platform that helps students and alumni engage with each other.
It’s been an undeniable success. NetWerx has matched hundreds of UConn student mentees with alumni mentors who have engaged with its ecosystem, with many of those connections leading to lasting relationships and some even producing employment opportunities post-graduation.
Last year alone, more than 450 students took part in NetWerx, connecting with about 200 alumni mentors.
But with that success has come a need for the program itself to continue to innovate.
“The question for us was: How can we create even more of an impact?” Gehring explains. “So, we worked on a strategic plan.”
And part of that plan led to NetWerx’s latest initiative: Bringing mentorship directly to students in the classroom by partnering with faculty, like Bailey, who embrace an entrepreneurial mindset.
“Julie reached out to me, and told me about NetWerx, and I thought it would be a good program for this personal brand management class,” Bailey says. “Spring 2024 was the first time we taught it in Storrs. I made NetWerx part of the participation grade –the students just had to connect two times with their mentor once they got matched, and then write a reflection about what they got out of the experience.”
Bailey utilized NetWerx for the first time that spring, and then again this past fall. About 80 students – half business majors and half from a variety of other disciplines – took part over the two semesters.
Gehring and her team visited the classes twice each semester to help guide the students through developing questions for their mentoring sessions, teaching them how to make the most of their time before meeting their alumni mentors.
“NetWerx’s initial strategy focused on integrating with courses and learning communities that had a connection to entrepreneurship, either through direct curriculum ties or by emphasizing entrepreneurial skill development,” say Gehring. “This included courses, like Heidi’s personal branding class, and learning communities, like EcoHouse with Thomas Hayes, as well as first-year experience (FYE) courses, such as Next Gen with Heather Parker. By aligning with these programs, NetWerx is able to tap into existing student interest in related topics and seamlessly introduce the benefits of mentorship within a familiar academic context.”
Open Conversations About Hard Topics
The NetWerx PeopleGrove platform then enabled the students in the class to connect with a mentor who had similar interests, and allowed Gehring and Bailey to see how those connections were going.
The response from her students was largely positive, Bailey says.
Some reported having open conversations about sometimes difficult topics, like salaries and promotions. Some were encouraged by their mentors to streamline their personal goals, to build new creative content that they hadn’t considered before – or to change gears completely.
By collaborating with us, faculty can seamlessly incorporate mentorship into their courses or learning communities. — Julie Gehring
For example, one student who’d been interested in a career in the U.S. Foreign Service learned it might actually not be the right path for them after meeting with an alumni mentor who had taken the same path.
Gaining that real-world perspective is what mentoring in general, and what NetWerx specifically, is all about, says Gehring.
“If you’re a finance major, you can talk to somebody that’s in a finance background,” she says. “And maybe that student says, you know what? I’ve gotten some perspective, and that’s not where I want to be. And so, when they figure out what they don’t want, they can continue to use our platform to find out what they do want. Let’s go talk to somebody that’s in psychology, let’s go talk to somebody in engineering, because we’ve got so many mentors who are willing to help and to take those calls.”
Opportunities That Can Change Lives
NetWerx continues to also operate as a program open to any student of any discipline, regardless of their course selections, who is interested in expanding their network or exploring an idea. The Werth Institute is holding open office hours three days a week this spring where undergraduates can drop in, learn more, and sign up.
But the program is hoping to partner with more faculty to help reach students who might otherwise not know about or consider taking part in a program like NetWerx.
From a faculty perspective, Bailey notes, successfully incorporating NetWerx into a course means building it in as a core component of the class that the faculty themselves are invested in.
“NetWerx is actively seeking partnerships with faculty who embed entrepreneurial skills into their courses to connect first and second-year students with alumni mentors,” adds Gehring. “From a co-curricular standpoint, we understand the significant time commitment involved in curriculum planning and instruction, which is why NetWerx aims to simplify the integration of mentorship into the classroom. By collaborating with us, faculty can seamlessly incorporate mentorship into their courses or learning communities. This partnership eliminates the burden of managing the screening of mentors, the matching process, and ongoing support of the mentor-mentee relationship, allowing instructors to focus on teaching while providing students with valuable mentorship experiences and expanded networks.”
And making that successful integration into the classroom, Bailey says, can be “life-changing” for the students who take full advantage of the opportunity.
“For the students who are motivated, they can really get a tremendous amount out of this, because when you get out in the work world, and you’re sending your resume out into the universe without having any connection with anybody, it’s really, really hard,” Bailey says. “You have to have people inside who can then connect you with others.
“For just about any class, there are enough alumni who are engaged in that discipline, who would be willing to connect either one-on-one or even come into the class and speak – I think it’s extremely valuable to get that inside perspective and to have the potential to stay in touch.”
January is National Mentoring Month – for more information, visit mentoring.org.
NetWerx is always recruiting – both student mentees and alumni mentors – and individuals interested in getting involved, as well as faculty interested in learning how NetWerx might fit in with their course design, are encouraged to contact Julie Gehring at julie.gehring@uconn.edu or Ian Bender at ian.bender@uconn.edu.
For more information about all of the entrepreneurial opportunities available through the Werth Institute, visit werth.institute.uconn.edu.
